Two years ago, I read the 2009 American Dietetic Association vegetarian position paper and recognized one of the two authors: Reed Mangels, a vegan advocate from the Vegetarian Resource Group. This didnât require any special insight, as she was cited as âAnn Reed Mangels, PhD,RD, LDN, FADA (The Vegetarian Resource Group, Baltimore, MD).â Still, I was surprised that a prominent vegan activist had worked on this paper, even if she was a dietitian. After reading vegans go on about these vegetarian position papers, and how credible they were because they constituted an endorsement of veganism from âeven the conservative American Dietetic Association,â I expected the authors to represent the American Dietetic Association as a whole -â and thus be staunch dietary bores, advocating mainstream recommendations like the USDAâs Food Pyramid/Four Food Groups/MyPlate; the impression was that their old fashioned ways would have prejudiced them against veganism, but they took a good look at the science and were forced to admit that abstaining from all animal products was perfectly fine and was perhaps beneficial: the hard facts trumped their conservative skepticism and meat industry ties.
But now that didnât seem to be the case at all. Instead, one of the authors was someone Iâd already heard of who advocated veganism for ethical reasons and thus had good reason to want veganism to be thought of as healthy.
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I didnât recognize the name of her co-author, Winston Craig, but I found his website and learned that he was a Seventh-day Adventist vegetarian who believed in the nutritional ideas of a woman named Ellen G. White. Then I looked up the American Dietetic Associationâs 2003 vegetarian position paper, and saw that it had three authors, and all of them were vegan for ethical reasons. This made me wonder whether the credibility of these vegetarian position papers was as unassailable as many vegans believed.
At that point, I called Donna Wickstrom at the American Dietetic Association (now the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics) and asked her why all of the authors of the ADA vegetarian position papers were vegans or vegetarians. She asked me if I knew that to be true of all the vegetarian position papers stretching back to 1988. I had to admit that I didnât, and said I would look into it and call her back. After researching the authors for all the vegetarian position papers going back to 1988, I found that all of them except for one were definitely vegetarians or vegans, and that the one possible non-vegetarian had been the keynote speaker at the First International Vegetarian Congress in 1987 â- an event organized by the Seventh-day Adventist reviewers of the vegetarian position paper she co-authored for the following year.
I called Donna again and told her that all but possibly one of the authors of these vegetarian position papers had been vegetarian or vegan, and asked why this was. She said vegetarians and vegans were chosen because they had the most knowledge of the subject. She added that the reviewers of the papers would have added a non-vegetarian perspective, limiting the possibility of bias.
So I started to research the reviewers, and found that many of them were vegans and vegetarians too. Before 2003, all of the reviewers were vegetarian or vegan -â usually for either religious or ethical reasons â- except for one in 1997. And the one non-vegetarian reviewer in 1997 was the now demoted co-author of the 1988 and 1993 papers.
The 2003 paper was a joint project with the Dietitians of Canada, which meant a wider variety of reviewers, but 2009 scaled back down on reviewers and included a line about the reviewers not being required to endorse the papers or position statements. The reviewers didnât seem to be the bias-mitigating force that Wickstrom had suggested they were.
Thatâs why I thought it would be useful to further research the beliefs of the authors and reviewers of the American Dietetic Associationâs vegetarian position papers.
It was probably too much work for the modest point I ended up wanting to make. That point is: there is a greater possibility for pro-veg*an bias in these papers than most vegans who cite them seem to realize. When vegans refer to âthe conservative American Dietetic Associationâ endorsing veganism, as if this were an unexpected development that could only have come about if the nutritional case for veganism were airtight, they probably donât know that ethical and religious vegans and vegetarians were the ones authoring these papers, and were often the ones reviewing these papers as well, and that the reviewers only have limited influence anyway because they are not required to endorse the papers or the position statements.
